'Blindness' review

Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo (Credit: Ken Woroner/Miramax)

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A mysterious epidemic of blindness breaks out in a major metropolitan city, but one woman (Julianne Moore) somehow remains immune. She accompanies her doctor husband (Mark Ruffalo) to a government quarantine where the infected are reduced to living like animals and one enterprising jerk (Gael García Bernal) attempts to use the situation to his advantage.

Big question: Does bad buzz from its opening slot at the Cannes film festival signal a grim fate for this adaptation of a well-regarded novel by Portuguese author José Saramago?

Skip it: Director Fernando Meirelles, an Oscar nominee for “City of God,” has accomplished the sort of epic folly that can only come from a serious filmmaker. Pretentious, irritating and sadistic, the film is visually and narratively ugly, wallowing in a sub-“Lord of the Flies” morality play before preaching “Babel”-borrowed banality about the interconnectedness of humankind.

Catch it: If you’d like to feel every bit as violated as many of the characters on screen.

Bottom line: It’s almost a miracle that Moore creates a compelling, if frustrating, central character. (She remains nameless throughout, as do all the characters. It’s, like, so incredibly universal that way.) But it would take much more than a miracle to save an art film dud like “Blindness.”

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